In modernity, the nation is an instrument for legitimizing the state and power. In modernity, a nation is a multitude of people united — almost sacralized — on the one hand by a shared language and by what is called folk culture: tales, mythology, tradition, and the territory they inhabit; and on the other hand by common economic, almost corporate interests that bind them together into a state.
In this sense, Nazism was not a malfunction, not an accident, and not some evil imported from outside. It was one of the extreme moves of modernity. Nazism is one of the peaks of the modern idea taken to its limit: the nation declared the highest value. Formally, it proclaimed the cult of rationality, science, and technology — including through the demonstrative sacrifice of humanism, by treating man as a biological object, an animal, by adapting Darwinian ideas to politics and reworking them into racial theory and social Darwinism. In Hegel, history is the self-unfolding of the World Spirit, which moves through peoples, through the Volksgeist, through concrete nations as through the steps of a ladder. “The existence of the state is the march of God in the world; its basis is the power of reason actualizing itself as will.” The Nazis brought this idea to its limit as a political instrument, asserting the myth of the thousand-year Reich and Germany as the final point of this “divine march.”
At the same time — outwardly paradoxically — the elite that preached cold rationalism was drawn to mysticism, runes, Aryan myths, and rituals. This was not accidental: in modernity, myths and folk culture are instruments for legitimizing the nation and the state.
The modern liberal-conservative tradition claims that the “spirit of the West” is individual freedom. However, in Hegel — one of the key thinkers of the West — in The Philosophy of Right, “freedom is the truth of necessity.” That is, man is free only to the extent that he consciously subordinates his will to the rational will of the state/people, to the Volksgeist. Therefore, one of the central accusations against Nazism — the suppression of individual freedoms for the sake of a common goal — is also one of the central ideas of Western thought, embodied at its limit.
It is important to note here that every viable thought, every effective ideology, is total. This means that it unfolds across all levels of the social system: some parts logically support others. Of course, most people do not sit around with philosophical or economic manuals, checking the logic of their own decisions against them. Rather, these are automatisms inside the field in which the thought itself unfolds.
The trial of Nazi criminals is revealing in this respect. They behaved rather confidently before the court, convinced that the very possibility of such a trial undermined the idea of the state as the basic unit of world order. Thus, the idea that citizens of a country acting in its interests could be put on trial seemed to them not merely debatable, but destructive of the very order of the world. In their eyes, this weakened the authority of the victors rather than strengthening it, making them potentially immune from judgment.
Nevertheless, they were tried with full severity. This was, of course, not the cause, but one of the early symptoms of the decline of modernity. A little later, Hannah Arendt proposed the concept of totalitarianism — humanist and liberal in itself, but one that became one of the key instruments for morally delegitimizing the enemy and reorganizing the world. The enemies of the free world were no longer full-fledged competitors, but less legitimate actors.
Yet if we look more broadly, total orders had existed before. In the age of tradition, the world also subordinated man — his way of thinking, his morality, economy, power, and private life as a whole — through religion, sacred order, and ritual. The difference with modernity is that totality was produced not through rationalized meaning, but through religious sacrality. Postmodernity arises precisely at the peak of modernity, when it discovers within it a tradition that has not been fully overcome. It is interesting that the West, as it were, brackets out its own “children” — Nazism and communism — and declares them something external, something that supposedly was never part of it.
Globalism already belongs to the epoch of postmodernity, when the idea of the state is overcome not through direct abolition, but through the highly productive instruments of postmodernity itself. “Suspicion toward grand narratives” makes any more or less coherent meaning appear too total, and therefore meaning is increasingly replaced by plastic form.
The concepts of nation, borders, and sovereignty do not disappear, but become plastic, playful, mobile instruments. For example, in Ukraine one sees slogan-markers such as “Ukraine above all” — an obvious calque of Deutschland über alles, with playful hints toward Nazism — while at the same time Nazism is defined primarily as “attacking other countries.” On the one hand, it is said that Ukraine is the country of Ukrainians and that every effort must be made to ensure that the Ukrainian language becomes the main and only language. On the other hand, it is said that the country must integrate into the common system. The example of Ukraine is not unique: the priority of national legislation and national interests is declared at the same time as the conviction that “international law” takes precedence over national law. This is not necessarily hypocrisy. It is the normal logic of postmodernity, where contradiction ceases to be a malfunction and becomes a working mode.
The key point here is not the individual contradictions, but international cooperation. Intercorporate ties and interests begin to compete with interstate ones not only in meaning, but also in real force of action. Often it is no longer possible to determine unambiguously which strategy a given state is pursuing and whose interests it is serving.
The modern world order is not a supranational government, not a shadow center, and not a single headquarters. It is distributed. Yes, there are powerful centers of force, but they do not form a single vertical hierarchy. Competing for interests at the same time are states, corporations, the global interests of various industries as communities of professionals serving them, theological concepts, social orders such as Islam, and secular adaptations of theocracy, such as Zionism. For the most part, there are no global analytical centers. There are no concrete “globalists” in the sense of particular individuals, secret societies like “the Freemasons,” or “Epstein’s clients.” Global financial companies also do not belong to one specific person. Rather, they are a network into which owners of financial assets with very different interests are integrated. The system unfolds by its own internal laws, in which form productively dominates meaning. In globalism, there really is no single coordinating center, no stable final meanings, and no final goals.
Globalism sustains itself because it corresponds to the interests of an enormous number of people. Most of the industries that today provide masses of people with labor and capital — education, production, finance, work processes, corporate culture — can exist at their present scale only globally. Therefore, globalism replicates and reproduces itself not only through external forms, but also through the very practice of thinking.
Every strong thought is total. The difference between epochs lies not in the presence or absence of totality, but in its mechanism. Modernity totalizes through meaning — nation, state, history, progress. Postmodernity totalizes differently: through form, network, procedure, compatibility, and the productive absence of a single obligatory meaning. Globalism, therefore, is not the collapse of order, but a new, more flexible and effective total assembly of the world.